No matter that the man overseeing my spiritual conversion, and the person who would marry us, was none other than Rabbi Hugo Gryn, distinguished academic and broadcaster, and survivor of Auschwitz. On the night of 20th February 2012, she lay in bed in the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea awaiting an operation the next morning to arrest the spread of cancer in her liver. Brilliant, Jewish, already an outsider, Pappworth was recognised as the best medical teacher in the country. It was while the couple were studying for their doctorates in America that Anthony came to rely on Joanna. My father/Who healed the sick/Now too far away/To heal me,/Stir your spirit/To remind me/What it is to live/The best that can be/Lived/So long as I am/Here.

Even this was not good enough because I could only convert into the Reform, not his own Orthodox branch. It was a small consolation to learn that he was even more dismissive of my predecessor for Joanna’s affection, the film director Alex Cox.We planned several years more at the school trying to work our magic, and then imagined a less stressful life, travelling together at last, writing books and spending time with friends and family with the 24-hour pressure of boarding life over.

His most important single contribution was the publication in 1967 of his book The Human Guinea Pigs: Experimentation on Man. Her father had been a highly controversial figure who had polarised those he met, and I suspect Joanna was anticipating a hatchet-job that would do nothing to serve her father’s memory.

After a number of years teaching at different schools, Joanna took time out of her career to have their three children, Jessica and Susannah, who both work in the civil service, and Adam, now a teacher. Seldon is a head teacher and appears on television and radio and in the press, [40] and has written regularly for national newspapers including The Times, [41] The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian. I was delighted when she got in touch to offer a review copy of her latest memoir, which reflects on her nearly half a century of friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin.

She would often be exhausted after visits that were too long, and would tire herself replying to messages from well-wishers. Although shy and reserved in many ways, she stood out with her dark hair, love of colourful clothing and bright lipstick. He was scathing about the experiments described in the book as “carried out on children, on pregnant women, mental defectives, on patients before and after an operation” and those with incurable diseases. She attributed much of her own later success in the fields of international human rights as having their origins in her conversations with Pappworth.

Last October, as her breathing was becoming increasingly vexatious, I phoned her in France, where she was on a short last trip with our son, to tell her that I had found a publisher for her poetry.

However, when she becomes enmeshed in a situation with her neighbours – Doris, who’s been left by her abusive husband, and her troubled son Nicolás – she understands some of the emotional burden of motherhood. The exclamation mark as we know it has been around since 1399, and by the 16th century its use for expression and emphasis had been codified. Her first book, By Word of Mouth, written with husband Anthony was published in 1983; Waterloo to Wellington was published in 2015; and The Whistleblower, which tells the story of the battle that her controversial father, Dr Maurice Pappworth, had with the medical establishment over experiments on human beings, will be published later this year.

I’m particularly pleased that two from this latest batch are “just because” books that I picked up off my shelves; another two are catch-up review copies. It was a beautifully crafted piece of work, successfully blending together her family’s personal history with a fiercely objective analysis of her father’s professional life. Waterloo to Wellington explores the qualities of character and intellect that made the Duke of Wellington's military campaigns so successful, and which Wellington College in turn aims to foster in its pupils. He was the 13th master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools, and is the current Head Master of Epsom College. It might have been easy, as his daughter, to paint either a simple loving or an equally simple hateful portrait, but Joanna offered the reader an unsentimental narrative, that rang true.